The present disclosure relates generally to systems and methods for providing flexible short locators. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods that enable one or more parameters to be passed via a short locator.
As electronic device networks become increasingly complex, locators (e.g., Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)) may become quite long, requiring memorization of long strings of characters to reach an intended target resource that may be identified based upon the locators. Further, the target resources increasingly utilize complex parameters that control output of the resources. For example, a search engine's URL may provide a multitude of parameters that may be used to control the search and/or the search results provided by the search engine, such as: a query parameter, a parameter to search for a particular string in result titles, URLs, text, results related to a particular string, and the like.
Locator shorteners have been developed to shorten long locators, enabling the use of a shortened locator in place of a long locator. However, these shortened locators typically take in hardcoded parameters of the long locator without providing an ability to alter the hardcoded parameters. It is now recognized that this results in an excessive number of short locators, as a short locator must be generated for each set of hardcoded parameters. For example, a shortened locator would be created for a hardcoded query parameter “car” and a separate shortened locator would be created for a hardcoded query parameter “truck”.
Certain embodiments commensurate in scope with the originally claimed subject matter are summarized below. These embodiments are not intended to limit the scope of the disclosure, but rather these embodiments are intended only to provide a brief summary of certain disclosed embodiments. Indeed, the present disclosure may encompass a variety of forms that may be similar to or different from the embodiments set forth below.